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Those of you who keep a close eye on The New York Times site may have noticed that one particular business blog, "You're the Boss," recently racked up more than 1,000 comments in a short period of time - so many comments that they closed the comments after only a couple of days.

The topic? "100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part I)."

It seems this blogger, Bruce Buschel, is in the process of opening a new seafood restaurant and has been blogging about his experiences along the way. He devised a list of 100 service rules for his new staff and posted just half of them on his blog. The result, as I said, was astounding. Most people felt that Buschel had pretty much hit the nail straight on the head.

I'm going to paste the rules below. Please read them and tell me if you agree with them or not. I agree with almost every one, with the exception of a few that I think would make the server seem a bit impersonal and cold. But I think these skills are sadly lacking in lots of local restaurants. Is there a restaurant in all of Southwest Virginia that gets all (or most) of these things right?

From "You're the Boss":

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

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PLEASE keep those ideas for "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" coming (blog post below)! Meanwhile, I have big food news out of Maryland -- the 30th Annual National Oyster cook-off has ended and several people went home with shiny silver trays and big grins on their faces. I know Maryland is not super local to Southwest Virginia, but the winter holidays are probably one of the biggest oyster-eating seasons in these parts, so maybe you guys will enjoy these recipes.

Jackie Hardin of Galena, MD won Grand Prize with her Oyster Tacos with Chipotle Cream Sauce. Your first reaction may be similar to mine - oyster tacos? But they actually sound pretty good - fried oysters with a cornmeal coating served in soft taco shells with slaw and the sauce. If you like oysters and you like fish tacos, this might be a neat twist.

Other winners were Jim McDuffie of Durham, NC, with his Outer Banks Poached Oysters on Smoked Pimento Cheese Grits with Fried Green Tomato Croutons, Brendan Cahill of Lusby, MD with Beach House Oysters with Sherry and Loic Jaffres of Leonardtown, MD with Oysters Bourguignon in Puff Pastry.

I'm going to share a couple of these recipes with you now. I'm trying to figure out if the rest are available online somewhere or if you have to write in to the Maryland Department of Agriculture to buy the cookbook. As soon as I hear back from the PR lady, I'll let you all know.

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I just couldn't NOT share this recipe from Simply Recipes. It reminds me of a delicious little appetizer that my good friend Stacy makes on occasion. Hers involves slicing a baguette and topping the pieces with chopped walnuts, pears and crumbles of gorgonzola cheese. She then bakes it in the oven a little bit before serving. The combination of flavors - sweet fruit, earthy nuts and salty, pungent cheese - are absolutely heavenly.

This recipe uses apples instead of pears, incorporates thyme, and is a bit more involved, but still does not look too hard considering that you can use a refrigerated, ready-made pie crust. I'll post the entire recipe below the jump. Enjoy!

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UPDATE: I talked to Kroger spokesman Carl York this afternoon, and he said the shortage is definitely affecting supplies of canned pumpkin in our area. Kroger stores are getting it "on allocation," which means they cannot get all that they order right now. He said he isn't sure when the rationing will end, but he does know that it has not affected supplies of frozen pumpkin pies or the pumpkin pies you can buy in the Kroger bakery.

"I know for some customers, that might not be an alternative," he said.

If you go to your Kroger store and cannot find canned pumpkin, check with the customer service desk. They may be able to tell you if another order is coming in or if they can get some from another store. Also remember that fresh pie pumpkins are a delicious alternative to canned pumpkin. If you can find pie pumpkins, all you have to do it split them in half, remove the seeds and stem, place them in a microwave-safe dish with about an inch of water on the bottom, cover and nuke until soft. Then scoop out the flesh, puree it and go from there as you would with a recipe that calls for canned pumpkin. Another good idea came from my co-worker Tonia Moxley, who is a great cook: try subbing butternut squash instead.

I don't know if you all have heard the news, but we may be facing a bit of a pumpkin shortage come holiday time (L.A. Times story; Baltimore Sun article). It's hard to believe, seeing the Halloween pumpkins stacked in front of grocery stores and spread across fields at the orchards, but it's true -- canned pumpkin is scarce right now, and when the shelves do get stocked, you might be paying upwards of an additional dollar for one can of Libby's, the leading brand.

Apparently, it was wet weather last pumpkin season that is negatively affecting supplies of canned pumpkin this year. That's because the canned pumpkin companies generally use surplus from the previous season to supply stores in September and October. Then, once this year's harvest begins, they can start stocking fresh cans.

I have to wonder if this year's harvest is going to be much better, though. At least in these parts, it seems a lot of people's summer squash harvests were ruined by too much rain. Maybe the harder shelled winter squashes are a different story. But it seems that most of the canned pumpkin comes from out west anyway.

Has anyone had trouble finding canned pumpkin at local grocery stores lately?

Wings of gold

Last week, a blog reader forwarded me a fascinating business article from The New York Times about chicken prices. According to the story, lots of restaurants have dropped wing specials or dropped chicken wings from the menu entirely in favor of "boneless wings," which are really just breaded chunks of chicken breast meat.

According to the article, this is happening because chicken wings, once little more than a throwaway part, are actually MORE EXPENSIVE now than chicken breasts. This may be more obvious to restaurant food buyers than supermarket customers because grocery stores may be trying to "preserve their margins on breast meat."

Is this happening because chicken wings have gotten so popular? In part, but the NYT reporter also found that when the economy took a nosedive, people stopped eating out as often and chicken breast sales slumped. But chicken wings were apparently still viewed as a cheap indulgence.

I haven't thought of chicken wings as "cheap" in quite some time. We buy them and make them at home pretty often, and by the time you factor in the work it takes to clean and trim them, we might as well go out to a restaurant and order a plate. We do it for fun and because our wings are pretty darn good.

Do you guys think boneless wings are a reasonable substitute for bone-in? If any chefs and restaurateurs are reading this entry, what do you make of the price flip-flop?

General Mills

The Chex Party Mix folks have been searching for a new flavor to add to their line of snacks, and the winner of a national contest will reportedly be announced in December.

Thousands of recipes flooded in to the company from people in all 50 states, and "a team of food experts" narrowed them down to just five recipes: Chex Pumpkin Pie Crunch, Lemon Rosemary Chex Mix, Buffalo Chex Mix, Chexicago Party Mix and Deviled Chex Mix.

The staff of the Extra section (and a few hungry co-workers who wandered by) sampled all five flavors and came to the conclusion that the Chexicago Party Mix, with its three kinds of Chex (wheat, corn and chocolate), cheese crackers, cheese popcorn and brown sugar was the best. We loved the salty and sweet combination. One person wrote "Sweet! Reminds me of Poppycock" and another wrote "If you want sweet and salty, this is the one for you. I like the popcorn."

Chexicago got an overall score of 20, followed by Deviled with 18.5, Buffalo with 17.5, Pumpkin Pie Crunch with 16.5 and Lemon Rosemary with 14. The last one scored lowest because we felt it did not have enough flavor. We detected neither lemon nor rosemary, only a faint flavor of garlic salt. To me, it tasted like garlic bread without enough garlic.

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Do you think you deserve to know the details of your food's journey from the field to your plate? I do, and it seems like a reasonable enough request. But apparently, some large food producers don't see it that way.

Yesterday, The New York Times published an investigative article about the safety of ground beef in America. The article centers around a 22-year-old dance instructor in Minnesota who will probably never walk again because she contracted a severe case of E. coli from a single hamburger her mother grilled on a Sunday evening.

Tracing the journey of that hamburger and millions of others produced and sold in the United States led reporter Michael Moss to some startling conclusions. Among them:

* "a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses." Given that, imagine how difficult it is to finger the offending company when someone gets sick from eating a tainted burger.

* Cargill, the company that made the burger the girl in the article ate, used a mixture of slaughterhouse timmings and other scraps, as well as ammonia-treated fat. "Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli," Moss wrote.

* The United States Department of Agriculture prohibits the sale of E. coli-tainted beef. But there is no requirement that grinders test their ingredients for E. coli. In fact, many do not test because the companies they buy from will not sell them scraps if they DO test. CostCo is one of the few big companies that do test all trimmings before they run them through the grinder. And because of that, CostCo's safety director told the Times, Tyson will not supply them.

* Properly cooking meat and washing up afterward the standard way, with hot soap and water, is not enough to kill all E. coli bacteria.

* "While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets," Moss wrote. "Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill's grinding operation." The New York Times was only able to see the redacted part when other sources provided them with the same documents, unaltered. They probably came from anonymous sources.

These are just snippets from the article. Clearly, to establish your own informed opinion, it would be best to read the Times article in its entirety. I am personally getting a little tired of hearing about things like this. We are a huge, civilized country with laws out the wahoo and we still can't be guaranteed a burger that isn't laced with crap? Or maybe that's the problem.

I wouldn't jump to point fingers at only the huge producers, either. Yes, local food is generally a safer bet, but even that cannot carry a 100% guarantee.

I see the grinder on my KitchenAid mixer getting a lot more action in the future. What do you think?

CondeNast publishing group has announced that it will stop making two food magazines, "Gourmet" and "Cookie." Word has it (here, here and here) that "Gourmet" recently had declining ad sales and "Cookie" may have just been too new to weather the economic storm. Personally, I have never read "Cookie" but I have enjoyed "Gourmet." My condolences to the people who are losing their jobs.

I read that they are also folding two bridal magazines. Funny that the four magazines they chose to stop publishing are largely targeted toward women, who are major checkbook holders in many households.

Chroniclebooks.com

I absolutely adore the title of this new book by Anita Chu, "Field Guide to Candy." I can't help but picture someone with the binoculars out, spying on a marzipan pear perched on a tree branch. Or a herd of gum drops slowly making their way across an empty field. Or a school of Swedish fish flitting in clear waters.

OK, so I spent way too much time as a kid flipping through the Audubon guides to plants, trees, birds and insects. Candy is oh-so-much tastier than insects, so flipping through this field guide to candy is even more delightful. And it's out just in time, folks. Because what better time of year for accurately identifying and making candy than the holiday season?

I know I'm probably freaking out those of you who hate any mention of Christmas before Halloween. Or before Thanksgiving, for that matter. I'm usually like that myself, but I just can't help but get excited about the cooking possibilities. Just the other night I read "About fudge" in "Joy of Cooking." Getting my mind in the right place.

I want to share a recipe from "Field Guide to Candy," but since it is a little early for winter holiday ideas, how about a recipe that'll be perfect for fall: candy apples! I know my co-worker and author of the Happy Wag blog, Nona Nelson, will appreciate this one. She was just craving candy apples the other day.

Chu offers up some great tips about candy making in this book. I'm not very adept at candy making, so I may invest in a candy thermometer. But she says if you don't have a candy thermometer, you can use the old-fashioned "cold water method," which involves dropping a drop of your hot sugar syrup into a bowl of cold water. What happens next determines the stage of your candy. Read on:

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Just a quick note this morning to tell you about two great food and drink deals I recently stumbled across in my social flutterings:

1. TGIFridays has one of the best happy hours I've found in Roanoke recently. Every weekday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., all of their appetizers are half price and they have some extremely affordable drink specials. I think domestic drafts are $2, and they have mixed drink specials, too. We had some Jack Daniels chicken strips for about $5 and a three-for-all sampler for about $6.50.

2. Awful Arthur's in downtown Roanoke has a new bar menu that's available during happy hour and after kitchen hours. It offers some great deals on their appetizers - most are about $4.95. This includes a slider sampler that comes with two sliders (your choice of crab cake, burger or tuna) and a pile of fries. You can get two crab cakes, two burgers, or any combination of the three. Howard and I recently shared this appetizer and found it to be delicious and filling. Great value for the money.

If you know of any other great deals, please share them!